With endless resources and predestined eyeballs, it’s hard to go wrong with mythology as revered as the Ramayana. But it’s harder to get right, if there is such a thing. This double-edged sword is on full display in Nitesh Tiwari’s 195-minute film. The most remarkable aspect of Valmiki’s ancient epic, like all timeless poetry and prose, is that you don’t have to be religious to feel its influence. Nearly every tale ever told can be traced back to the works of Valmiki and Homer; it’s the origin story of storytelling itself. Given that the Ramayana was an introduction to literature for many of us — through illustrated pages, bedtime reading or television serials — the nostalgia does half the job. Not unlike comic-book fans who finally get to enjoy their favourite superheroes come alive on a big screen, we let anticipation define our viewing experience.
In the press screening, for example, clapping and hooting and knowing nods preceded the moments seared into collective memory. You can hear them coming: the entry of Ayodhya’s young prince blindfolded on a horse; images of the soaring demigod bird; the stringing of a divine bow in front of an enthralled princess; the dramatic beginning of a 14-year-old exile; a severed nose; a golden deer and a holy line drawn in soil. But the live reactions have more to do with the formative beats that already exist in our heads. In other words, the film-making does little to supply these ready-made thrills. If all the scenes have to do is show up, the inherent closeness to the source material becomes anticlimactic. We rarely engage with the adaptation. If anything, we engage with the absence of adaptation. We end up reading it more than watching and reliving it.
In many ways, Ramayana: Part 1 is too anxious to be a story alone. It’s often weighed down by the pressure to represent the cinema of faith rather than the cinema of fantasy. Its identity as a cultural touchstone defeats its ambition as an artistic benchmark. It is so eager to be retold that, at some level, it forgets to be told. Ironically, the mythology has come full circle: there have been so many indirect renditions of the good-versus-evil template over the decades that a literal translation in 2026 feels like an interpretation of all those indirect ones. It’s been subtext for so long that the text looks like a derived consequence instead of an original epic.
The scale of the film is impressive, but the real ‘set-pieces’ in the Ramayana were always the characters, their choices and their conversations. The sensory overload of the visual grammar — green-screen backgrounds, vivid colours, skies, cosmic glows, monsters and mayhem — is designed to offset the risk-averse dialogue and flat interactions. They do and say things because it’s written; any deviations might be blasphemous. For instance, the pre-interval scene of King Rama being asked to give up the throne and go on exile by his heartbroken father is supposed to reach an emotional crescendo. It is technically an action sequence where every word is an arrow and every command, a puncture wound. But the score of Hans Zimmer (in the rousing scenes) and A.R. Rahman (in the edgier ones) works overtime to do what the staging and actors cannot: provide a psyche beyond the spectacle. You want to feel the son’s righteousness guilt-tripping the elders. A similar moment in S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali 2: The Conclusion earns the despair of the man obeying his mother, but Tiwari’s license to evoke is suspended by the fear to create. It’s media-trained mythology: there is no losing in this case, but there is no winning either.
Despite the running time, the first half appears to be in a hurry to tick off a checklist. It moves at breakneck speed, no sequence is allowed to breathe (as opposed to the stormy stillness of, say, a Sanjay Leela Bhansali historical), and dynamics are not established so much as narrated. There’s a lot happening in every frame, but the assumption is that we know the brief enough to straight away admire the detailing. There’s a mismash of styles. The action and violence favour the fantasy-coded realism of the West — the texture of creatures and deformed rakshasas, Jatayu’s eyes — over the mic-drop timing and cultural specificity of the East. Apart from a few neat touches (like Sita closing her eyes and grinning when she ‘hears’ a suitor lifting the Pinaka), the choreography is largely functional.
No environment is spared; the volume of information is so high that the craft is often playing catch-up. The second half is relatively tighter, when the central figures are in exile and forced to contend with each other as co-inhabitors. Once the internal strife in Ayodhya makes way for the external threat, the physicality of the crises is more focused. Even the uneven lighting of the faces against CGI scenery doesn’t dent the broader picture. But the tension stems from the knowledge of what happens next, not the surprise of how it happens.
The interesting part about Lord Rama in this film is that his inborn enlightenment as an all-knowing deity is challenged by the tragedies that keep befalling him. His belief in dharma and destiny is treated as an act of suppression. By the end, his godliness almost breaks into pieces of humanity and personhood. It’s as far as one can go with the arc. You’d think there’s nobody better than Ranbir Kapoor — the modern poster-child for coming-of-age greatness — to depict the Ground Zero of this motif. But Kapoor’s turn is the holy elephant in the room. The familiarity of his stardom and the flawed men he transforms is so etched into the popular lexicon that he acts doubly hard to look flawless. The result is a deadpan and contextless sincerity. I get that it’s tricky in VFX-heavy productions, but virtue cannot look like a nervous performance.
The quivering face and careful delivery satirise our impression of the story. You low-key expect him to explode and drop the ruse, until you remember who he’s playing. It doesn’t help that our relationship with the language — the chasteness of Hindi, the cosplay traditionalism — makes everyone sound like they’re breaking the fourth wall. It creates a dissonance between a hi-tech exterior and a television-serial aesthetic. I also get that perhaps the actors see themselves as mediums, but even when there is the freedom to imagine (Brahmastra: Part One — Shiva), the apprehension to offend leaves little space for the foundational wonder of such stories. Even romantic chemistry becomes a Lakshman Rekha that cannot be crossed: forget reclaiming the core message of compassion that has been co-opted over the centuries. The verbal exchanges reveal how tough it is to distill the elemental essence of the Ramayana within the asterisks of contemporary culture.
Which brings us to the film’s Padmaavat-sized problem. When the valour is so calibrated, the antagonist is bound to steal the show. The best stretches of Ramayana revolve around Yash’s Ravana, because it’s the one time the makers aren’t shackled by the rules of engagement and devotion. The warrant to experiment liberates the film in these portions. It opens with his backstory, and it’s a backstory so compelling that it almost undoes the DNA of the epic. It pays so much attention to Ravana as a wronged Asura and a king blessed with immortality that it’s difficult to fault him; he protects his subjects in Lanka, fights for his family, respects women, brings prosperity, and is driven by principle.
The screenplay humanises him to an extent where the impending rivalry and war become a footnote; the most striking set-piece, too, features him abducting Sita (Sai Pallavi) on the Pushpak Vimana. The film operates in a separate tenor when he’s on screen, raising its game in honour of the elasticity it is afforded. It’s easier to play to the gallery as a villain, but the construction of Part 1 — where both rulers occupy journeys that are yet to intersect — lends Ravana a sense of individualism. It’s not entirely intended, but the film is better for it.
Our perspective is also derived from the fact that Yash plays him not too differently from the hyper-masculine beards we’ve seen across Indian cinema in the last decade. We are so wired to perceive them as tortured tragic figures for whom rage and revenge are expressions of love and morality that the ‘heroism’ of Ravana is hard to escape. It’s tempting to believe that he’s the first ancestor of the greyness we see in new-age movies, but it’s the other way around. He’s the descendant of this trend, which makes Yash’s presence so strange: like a future hero from the real world disguised as a mega-villain of mythology. In other words, yesterday’s Ravana is today’s Kabir and Ranvijay and Pushpa. It’s no surprise, then, that the revelation of his ten heads drew the loudest cheers of the screening; it’s the one intro sequence that rewards the anticipation. After all, who doesn’t want multiple personalities — and genres — for the price of one? Who doesn’t want more voices in a film that chants its way to history?